LOL Slashdot

Poor Nicholas. He can say something that is completely true, and get pilloried for it.

What Nicholas said, from TFA: “But what we did…was we had Sugar do the power management, we had Sugar do the wireless management — it became sort of an omelet. The Bios talked directly with Sugar, so Sugar became a bit of a mess. It should have been much cleaner, like the way they offer [it] on a stick now.”

What should have happened: OLPC should have worked to get system-level changes into the upstream Linux kernel / X / other projects, and Sugar should have been a desktop environment sitting on top.

What actually happened: OLPC forked its own distro and called the whole thing “Sugar”, pushed a ton of XO-specific changes in this distro, and wasted a lot of engineering cycles fighting to maintain a fork. This mistake was a crucial and painful mistake — one that we have fought to remedy in the context of Fedora 10 and Fedora 11. Two release cycles of nothing but pushing XO-specific code upstream, everywhere we find it.

I’ve certainly had my disagreements with Nicholas in the past — I still think it’s a shame how much community goodwill OLPC squandered by failing to be sufficiently transparent — but let’s not put words in the man’s mouth. Saying “the way we did Sugar was a big mistake” is a completely different thing from saying “Sugar was a big mistake”.